AttributesToGet (legacy)
Note
We recommend that you use the new expression parameters instead of these legacy parameters whenever possible. For more information, see Using expressions in DynamoDB. For specific information on the new parameter replacing this one, Use ProjectionExpression instead.
The legacy conditional parameter AttributesToGet
is an array of one or more attributes to retrieve from DynamoDB. If no
attribute names are provided, then all attributes will be returned. If any of the
requested attributes are not found, they will not appear in the result.
AttributesToGet
allows you to retrieve attributes of type List or Map;
however, it cannot retrieve individual elements within a List or a Map.
Note that AttributesToGet
has no effect on provisioned
throughput consumption. DynamoDB determines capacity units consumed based on item size,
not on the amount of data that is returned to an application.
Use ProjectionExpression instead – Example
Suppose you wanted to retrieve an item from the Music table,
but that you only wanted to return some of the attributes. You could use a
GetItem
request with an AttributesToGet
parameter, as
in this Amazon CLI example:
aws dynamodb get-item \ --table-name Music \ --attributes-to-get '["Artist", "Genre"]' \ --key '{ "Artist": {"S":"No One You Know"}, "SongTitle": {"S":"Call Me Today"} }'
You can use a ProjectionExpression
instead:
aws dynamodb get-item \ --table-name Music \ --projection-expression "Artist, Genre" \ --key '{ "Artist": {"S":"No One You Know"}, "SongTitle": {"S":"Call Me Today"} }'